Top 10 Technology predictions for 2014: Zinnov

New Delhi, India, December 21, 2013: Zinnov, a leading Market Expansion and Globalization Advisory firm, today released the list of top 10 trends that will set the tone for the India Domestic IT Market in 2014. According to Zinnov, the growth in mobile internet users has been accelerated by increasing smartphone penetration, which expected to reach approximately 150 Mn by 2015. Enterprise mobility market is expected to increase almost 5 folds, touching USD 1 Bn by mid-2015, up from USD 244Mn in 2011.Realizing this trend, Indian enterprises stand to derive enormous operational & business benefits thereby setting a strong platform for IT transformation in 2014.

The top ten strategic technology trends for 2014 include:

Manufacturing Excellence through technology adoption will be the primary force behind economic recovery: While the Indian services sector is increasingly focusing on hiring high-end skills and agriculture sector relying on unskilled labour (at large), growth of manufacturing sector and job creation of semi-skilled workforce will emerge as the primary force behind economic growth in the country in 2014.

Community networks will present massive unparalleled opportunity for technology companies. Large number of small & medium enterprises which exist in the form of local/social physical communities will emerge as “new category of target SMBs” by large enterprises. Also, as the internet & mobile ecosystem evolves in the country, we expect a number of technology centric opportunities around web enablement, issue resolution, CRM, web advertisements etc. to arise in this segment in 2014.

UID will drive large scale technology adoption at the grass root levels. Registrations of UID are expected to reach 600 million by end of 2014 (i.e. almost 50% of India’s population) which will mark the second wave in terms of leveraging the platform for delivering citizen centric services. While large banks and telecom companies may only leverage it as another KYC model, nimble players will leverage the ecosystem to deliver innovations such as card-less transactions, automating employee verification / tracking, e-health (remote diagnosis and disease management). This will drive large scale technology adoption at the grassroots levels. Making
these devices light weight and low power and connected to Smartphones can be potential game changer in the technology adoption.

E-health & E-education will emerge as the next 2 big categories after E-commerce: Internet users in India grew rapidly to reach 200 million+ users in 2013. This growth has also given a fillip to delivery of services such as education, health, banking, etc. over internet. Online delivery of education can help deliver more value owing to lower set-up and operational costs. Initiatives such as low cost tablets, National Knowledge Network (program to connect over 30,000 colleges) and platforms such as Educomp’s virtual studios, Tutorvista, etc. are expected to increasingly digitise education delivery. Similarly in the healthcare space, Lack of hospitals and medical staff is giving rise to e-medicine in India. Both government as well private sector initiatives have been in motion for some time and 2014 is expected to bring mainstream adoption.

Discovery & hyper local visibility related technology solutions will be the primary focus of Indian SMBs: As only 500,000-700,000 out of the 10 million technologically addressable SMBs have websites, digital discovery solutions particularly in the exponentially growing mobility realm would become increasing central for SMBs. With google tweaking its smartphone search algorithm in order to promote mobile “friendly” websites, there would be potentially a huge market of making existing websites mobile ready. Early signals of hyper local discovery engines are already emerging and present huge potential in 2014.

Enterprise Mobility will take a large share of transformational IT focus of Indian enterprises: Enterprise mobility market is expected to increase almost 5 folds, touching USD 1 Bn by mid-2015, up from USD 244Mn in 2011. Enterprises are excited by the possibility of bringing in better operational & process efficiencies, opening up new business opportunities & providing better customer service through a connected, agile workforce in 2014.

Konntected Network of Things (KNoT) is an evolved concept of traditional internet of things (IOT) with a wider scope including the M2M interaction over a local network, going beyond the dependence on internet. KNoT technologies are on the rise and it is estimated that over the next decade the opportunity is bound to generate revenue in excess of USD 10 trillion with more than 30 billion connected devices. The hype around KNoT has been building up and it is believed that by the end of 2014 it will reach the peak and in another couple of years it should be in the zone of enlightenment

India to become 2nd largest technology start-up ecosystem in the world, over the last 2 years 20+ privately run accelerators and funding groups have been launched with most of them supporting 5-10 start-ups annually on an average. With a large numbers of stakeholders coming forward in support of the start-ups, India is all set to experience a new age for technology entrepreneurs. India is expected to take less than half the time it took Silicon Valley to be where it is today.

Localized marketing will play an important role in driving technology adoption in India. The evolution of the $32 Bn+ domestic IT market in India is giving rise to newer marketing themes. Given the massive opportunities in India market and growth patterns that are different from developed world, the marketing organizations of large technology companies are increasingly being challenged to innovate on marketing messages & themes which are relevant to the market evolution in India. Some of the large organizations have already tasted initial success with this approach and as India gains strategic importance for global companies, we will see a number of
technology companies taking this path going forward.

Social media will drive significant monetization opportunities in 2014. Social media in India today accounts for 25% of total online minutes & 83% of India’s online population uses Facebook. Many organizations have already started measuring social media efforts through leads, sentiment, and brand visibility etc. consequently attributing significant revenue uplift to social media efforts. 2014 will continue to see efforts by organization in social media and especially by niche businesses to acquire direct customers, spread awareness through existing customer recommendation and direct referral traffic to existing web properties even with potentially
limited marketing budgets.